Subject: My summer with Nat

It was the summer of 1949 and I was eleven years old. Baton Rouge, La had a population of 110,000.
I lived on the south side of the city where you could ride your bicycle for just a few miles and be
in total wilderness.

Early in June of that year I hopped on my bicycle and started riding south down Perkins Rd. further than at any time before. I reached a point about 10 miles out where the pavement ended and the small dirt road began. It was  called Essen Lane and is now an area of upper middle class homes.

Riding further a couple of miles I saw a slow moving slough on the left side of the road and a skinny coal black kid sitting on a old fallen log right next to the slough.

He had on a pair of torn old dungaree overalls that he had out grown and the cuffs barely reached the top of his ankles. He had no shirt on and his carbon black skin glistened with sweat. He held a short pole of about 6 feet with a string tied to it that entered the water. I saw him pull up a crawfish which hung on a piece of bacon he had tied the string to.

I got of my bicycle and walked the short distance to him and asked, "Wacha doin.?" He replied, "I'm catching sumpen to eat."  

I sat there with Nat for an hour or so and he let me catch a few with his pole. After he had 15 or so of real big beautiful orange crawfish, he built a small fire and put the crawfish in a large quart can and boiled them with the same water from the slough. He shared his feast with me and that began a one summer friendship with Nat.

Nat lived with his mother and a younger sister in one of those tiny Southern shotgun clapboard house with a small front porch. There were about 10 of those same houses side by side and obviously were built by a farmer to house his workers in many years ago when this land was farmed for cotton, but had grown to be nothing but woods with huge hardwood trees.

I would bring my BB gun to Nat's house and we would take off in the woods shooting everything from birds, snakes to rats. I would let him share my BB gun. We would also do a lot of craw fishing as well as fishing in a small lake nearby catching a mess of bream which his mother would prepare for us.

Most days, his mother would feed us cheese and saltine crackers at the small table in the house. It was a sharp cheddar like cheese which she would slice off from a medium size block. It was the best cheese I've ever eaten and to this day, one of the treats I give
myself on a rare occasion is to buy the sharpest cheddar cheese I can find and go to town on it with saltine crackers.

When I do this, my memories come vividly galloping back of sitting at the table with Nat and his mother enjoying that feast.

I spent most days of the week riding my bicycle to play with Nat. He and I were summer buddies. Every now and then I would steal a dollar bill from my mother's purse and give it to Nat so he and his mother could buy some candy or whatever.

Back in 1949 in Louisiana, a white boy and a black boy cavorting together was a big no no and I took a chance doing this because if my father ever found out he would have whipped the dickens out of me.

I was almost caught when my dad found a "will" I had written declaring that if I die my bicycle, BB gun and anything I owned was to go to Nat. He asked me who Nat was and I told him it was just a friend of mine in school.

I believe it was the next year when I attended a boarding school called Gulf Coast Military Academy. I went for a year and the summer after  GCMA I went out to see Nat, but he was gone. His mother told me he left home to look for a job

That fall, my family moved to Albuquerque, NM and we stayed there for two years before my Dad decided he wanted to return to Louisiana.

I was 15 when we returned and one Xmas at my maternal Granpa Mulina's home in Franklinton, La where everyone was supposed to be in a Xmas family reunion and happy, I got into an argument with my Dad because I told him that I didn't think it was right for blacks to have to sit in the back of public busses. Dad had been drinking and the argument went downhill and he jumped on me and began beating me with his fists while he was on top of me. He beat me up really bad---broken nose and two black eyes. One of my uncles told my wife Carmen a few years ago before he died that he had never seen a boy beaten up that bad.

After he had finished with me I told him, crying like hell, that he would have to do this a hundred times as I would always feel the same about blacks  having to sit in the rear of the bus. Well, he didn't beat me up again over this. We had an uneasy truce afterwards. Later on as an adult, I forgave him because he didn't know any better just like 99% of the white people and they were just a victim of the Southern culture we lived in.

Why was I different. I've asked myself that question a thousand times. I've come to the conclusion there are people like me who were born with some innate sense of right and wrong and a keen sense of injustice when you see it. It's like I was always pulling for the underdog. I would go into a rage when I saw a high school fight where the victor would began to kick the vanquished on the ground. I would charge through the crowd and grab the kicking guy and vanquish him. Of all the guys I've detested are the ones who in a verbal argument sucker punch the other guy. I consider them immoral with no sense of fair play. I felt the same way about bullies.

Now having written the above, I have to confess that at times I conformed with my friends about their hate for blacks growing up in the south. Not overtly, but failing to disagree with them when maybe I should have. I conformed because if I would begin telling them that I thought segregation was wrong and immoral, hell, I wouldn't have had any friends. So, I would keep my mouth shut and let them rant.

As a kid, I had many black encounters where we were friends. I remember the black grocery store delivery boy who let me ride the store's  Cushman motor scooter at times. I remember well the elderly black man who worked on my motorbike at his shotgun house. He would be sitting on a pail with the ever present stogie in his mouth and we would talk about all kinds of things while he was working. He showed me how to pull the flywheel off and set the points and replace the condenser. He never charged me more than 2 dollars. I remember fishing many summers in the LSU lake side by side with a big black mammy or some older black guy where we would talk about everything under the sun.

My sister and I were practically raised by a black lady named Mabel Broussard. Mabel was a live in Nanny during the week because both my parents worked. My sister and I loved Mabel and she was like my second mother. I still remember sitting on her lap and her telling us stories about Voodoo occurrences.
In her shotgun house she had snakes, frogs and spiders in jars filled with alcohol. She used them in her voodoo religous rites. When she died when I was about 10 years old I cried my heart out. She never spanked us as that was forbidden. But, I deserved spanking believe you me. When we were out in the
yard, I would turn the water hose on her when she wanted me to come back in the house.

Way down on Chartres St. in the black area of New Orleans there was a nightclub with a small red light announcing it. It had no name.  It was owned by a big fat Cuban black lady and she had nothing but Cuban music on the jukebox. I was 25 years old and the only white guy in this place which would fill up on the weekends. I would dance with many black women and I never ever once had a problem or a
bad encounter. They knew I loved Cuban music and love to dance it. (I don't know as I would do that now though)

In any case, I guess I was born without prejudice and accepted those who treated me decently. Yes, there have been blacks I didn't like. Yes, there have been Southern rednecks I didn't like. Yes, there have been Yankees I didn't like and yes there have been Latin Americans I didn't like. But, the dislike has always been determined in how they treated me.

I wanted to write this and get it off my chest as early in the morning I was watching a PBS documentary about Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and how he caught so much hate writing about a white boy with a black guy named Jim going down the Mississippi river on a raft. His book was censured in many
libraries.

Mark Twain wrote that he was going to end the book by having Huck Finn reveal the location of Jim to Jim's slave owner. But, in worrying about this ending for days, he decided not reveal Jim's location and Twain said to himself, I'll just go to hell for ending the book that way..

Twain's book is famous for revealing the first time that a Negro was a thinking and hurting individual who was capable of deep emotion and not some field slave who could not feel.

Incidentally, Mark Twain was an atheist like myself. I love his answer to a reporter who asked him if he, being an atheist, was worried where he was going after he died. He answered, "Not at all. I was there millions of years before I was born."

Bob White
August 4th, 2014